1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of geometric modeling and more particularly to geometric modeling using multiple data acquisition means.
2. Related Art
Creating a three-dimensional (3D) model of geometrical surfaces can be carried out by using 3D scanners, enabling to measure points over the surface, often called point cloud, each point in the cloud represented by three coordinates (x,y,z).
The density of the points in the point cloud usually depends on the scanner's resolution. A high resolution scanner can provide a dense cloud comprising high number of measured 3D points, producing a data file for each scanning session (e.g. represented via a three-dimensional matrix indicating each coordinate indicator of each measured point). The size of the file may be inefficient for various applications such as for online streaming of the measured data, real time analysis of the point cloud, etc.
High-resolution scanners can be quite expensive and may fail to provide additional information such as the coloring and texture of the surface. Moreover, these scanners may not be efficient for identifying objects and elements along the surface scanned and may be hard to handle in image analysis for identification of such objects due to their substantially homogenous scanning of the surface. These scanners usually do not enable changing the scanning resolution according to the amount of detailing (elements and objects) in each part of the surface scanned mainly since such information and distinction can only be executed once the scanning data is already provided.